Coming soon in 2016 will be The Grapple Annual No. 2. After several hefty rounds of submission selections and editorial collaborations, we have locked in 42(!) works for this Annual. Again, each work relates in a unique way to its own special date on the calendar. And, again, this will be a book full of diverse but uniformly excellent prose, poetry, art and comics for you to both grapple with and enjoy. This time, they’ve come from 42 writers and artists from many places on the planet: Canberra, the ACT region and many other Australian locations, but also the UK, the USA, Canada and Egypt. We’re immensely proud to be publishing each and every one of them. This Annual has been long-awaited, but it’s gonna be totally worth it.

So while we’re making the final editorial touches and designing the book that will somehow contain it all, we’d like today for you to share in our anticipation. There will be more news soon, including further call outs, release dates and launch details. But for now …

The tiny team at Grapple Publishing was enormously excited last week when it was announced that The Grapple Annual No. 1 is one of three books shortlisted for the Small Press Network’s Most Underrated Book Award 2015!

We’re still enormously excited, but at least the quivering in our digits has stopped enough for us to type out little updates like this. A huge proportion of the praise must go to all of our contributors, the writers and artists who submitted amazing work to make up our first fledgling anthology. A bunch of kudos must also go to the Small Press Network, and all the judges, for putting effort behind a unique award that so brilliantly captures some of the best of independent publishing: highlighting, spotlighting and limelighting previously underrated and underrepresented work.

So now we wait and see what eventuates, with the award night on Friday the 20th of November at The Wheeler Centre in Melbourne. We’ll be there, so see you there? And it’s on the second day of the Small Press Network’s Independent Publishing Conference, so we’ll be there with bells figuratively affixed. For now (and we’re sure the other shortlisted authors and publishers would agree), just to be shortlisted kinda feels like we’re all winners already.

This excitement simply cannot be allowed to stop, so we have another announcement. We’ve just commenced a month-long visual art call-out for The Grapple Annual No. 2! Yup, we were blown away by all the written submissions, we’ve chosen them and we’re well underway editing them for publication. But increasing the proportion of visual art in the Annual is one of our aims, thus: this new call-out.

To submit (and pre-peruse all the details) head to the Submittable page. But the gist is ‘Australian artists, send us a magnificent date-based visual art submission!’ We want it all: comics, photos, illustrations, collage, digital works, anything and everything that’s visual art. We’d love to hear from the emerging and the underrepresented, we’d love to be surprised. And we are, of course, more than happy to discuss stuff and be pitched at also. We’ve got an editor (Duncan), a visual art editor (Fin) and an Assistant Editor (Rachael), ready and waiting.

All going well (though we do things slowly around here), we’ll have a full list of contributors (including our new artists!) announced in late October, with The Grapple Annual No. 2 launched in November, or at least before the year’s out. So much and many excitements!

Us? We’ve been busy these past few months, busy reading and selecting submissions for The Grapple Annual No. 2. Sorry it has taken us a while! But in fact, we’re just starting to send out responses to all you submitters out there, including a select few acceptance emails. You should be hearing from us within a week or two. Pretty exciting times. We hope to have some public announcements and details (names, titles, dates, etc!) by August. But let us tell you: No. 2’s already shaping us to be a smashing Annual.

Also: Grapple Publishing is now on Instagram. Click us, loveheart us, put filters our hashtags or something. Join us on the journey as we work out what the hell we’re doing signing up for distraction when we should be editing.

And speaking of distraction, there’s no better way to distract yourself from social media than by reading a book. So, for the rest of July, we’re having a little sale: free postage anywhere in Australia for any and all remaining copies of Annual No. 1! So order yours now (maybe even get your favourite date/number if you ask even a little bit nicely).

S-A-L-E !

P-A-R-T-whY?

Because we felt like celebrating, we felt like giving an opportunity to those who haven’t read No. 1 yet, and we felt we had to make room for the impending boxes of Annual No. 2.